Abstract

Past mechanistic accounts of children’s word learning claim
that a simple type of cross-situational learning is powerful enough to match
observed rates of learning, even in quite ambiguous situations.
However, a limitation in some of these analyses is their reliance on an
unrealistic assumption that the learner only hears a word in situations
containing the intended referent.
This study analyzed a more general type of cross-situational learning based on
the relative frequency of word-object pairs, and found it to be slower than the
simple mechanism analyzed in prior work.
We then analytically explored whether relative-frequency learning can be improved
by incorporating the mutual exclusivity (ME) principle—an assumption that
words map to objects 1-to-1.
Our analyses show that with a certain type of correlation in word-to-word
relationship, ME makes relative frequency learning as efficient as fast-mapping,
which can learn a word in one exposure.